


Going Nowhere

by halotolerant



Series: After Rome [2]
Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Canon Disabled Character, Episode: s03e13 4C, Episode: s03e14 Provenance, First Time, M/M, Safehouses, Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-29
Updated: 2014-07-29
Packaged: 2018-02-10 03:03:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2008470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/halotolerant/pseuds/halotolerant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Before today, Harold would have said that sex was nothing whatsoever like knowledge. That knowledge was useful, inspiring, elevating and dignifying, and sex was more like a badly-organised sport with too few rules.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Going Nowhere

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [По дороге в никуда](https://archiveofourown.org/works/2373770) by [Fandom_Person_of_Interest_2014](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fandom_Person_of_Interest_2014/pseuds/Fandom_Person_of_Interest_2014), [Madoshi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Madoshi/pseuds/Madoshi)



> This makes essentially a sequel to 'Like the Wind Needs the Trees', but that simply assumes Harold and John got together at the end of '4C' in Rome, so you don't have to read that to understand this, I think. 
> 
> This is set between 3x13 and somewhere before the end of Season 3.
> 
> Many thanks to **elfwhistletree** once more for a great beta, and I also owe a lot of inspiration to **kindkit** <3

\- - -

After sex comes silence, for a while.

There's a whining, alarmingly large, Italian mosquito making figure-eights in the air above Harold's head, and his thoughts turn to John Donne, and that man’s poem envying the intimacy enjoyed by the fleas wandering the body of his mistress. This was perhaps a more romantic line of thinking in the 1600s, when it was believed that during sex your blood mingled with your partner's and was thus a true entrance to the inner body rather than merely spilling fluids in blind cul-de-sacs.

What does it matter, really, intimacy of the body? What about the mind, the true person?

Harold knows so many people so intimately in that way. Knows browser histories and quiet, anonymised transactions, weekend motel payments, playlists, expunged legal records, long hours staring at pill bottles in well-lit expensive bathrooms. Things that people keep from everyone. Things that people keep from themselves. Acid-weeping, cocooned secrets from deep down, he can reach them all.

(When he set out to save humanity from itself, he never quite realised how much 'itself' there was.)

Harold knows so much, and once upon a time knowledge was something like sex. 'To know', in any good 17th century Bible, did not mean waving at someone on the street. To know: to discover, uncover, be intimate with. To fuck. Two sides of the same linguistic coin. And in that same text, of course, the first result of the human appetite for knowledge was the understanding of nakedness, as Adam and Eve collected leaves to cover themselves, learning shame. For that knowledge paradise was lost, and humanity was left with only itself, though at least with a selection of new activities to explore.

Before today, Harold would have said that sex was nothing whatsoever like knowledge. That knowledge was useful, inspiring, elevating and dignifying, and sex was more like a badly-organised sport with too few rules. That knowledge really could draw people closer, but sex, whilst pleasurable - the pellet-release reward of a body programmed to reproduce since the true genesis from the primeval sludge - was sticky, strangely complex to engineer in three dimensions and ultimately about nothing but the self.

It's not, after all, like he hadn't understood before today that John had genitalia, or even that before today he hadn't seen that for himself - surveillance is surveillance and it happens, and injuries need tending and occasionally inner leg measurements taken.

No, a feeling of greater closeness, of understanding something more deeply, recognising more fully or connecting more profoundly, simply because you have exchanged friction in the pursuit of endorphins is totally unwarranted.

"Harold," John is saying, softly, from the other side of the bed. "Harold, breathe."

And John’s hand, naked, bare – bare all the way along, bare arms, bare chest, bare stomach, all naked – sweeps up and over Harold's chest, coming to rest cupping his face, turning his head so his gaze meets John’s dark eyes.

“I didn’t hurt you?” John is asking, real anxiety in his tone, for all he’s trying to keep his voice soothing and level.

It was painful. The bending and the need to move about, even for the small action they just shared, mere reaching and rubbing. Now Harold’s leg is throbbing. But then he’s got it that bad before from trying to rearrange low-lying encyclopaedias.

“I’m...” Harold licks his lips, tries to focus his eyes after so long drifting away into the ceiling. “I’m just trying to... Writing essays in my head, it’s always been a way to...”

"Harold,” his name in John’s voice, did it always sound like that? “Please, tell me?”

So unsure that Harold will trust him, still, and that is why Harold tries so hard to answer:

"I knew it would be different. I mean, I expected it to be. I couldn't help that. Childhood programming. That being with a man would be..."

“Different?” John sounds uncertain, still uneasy.

Harold, ungracefully, levers himself with his arms to roll onto his side, lies on his protesting hip and looks a little longer at John, at the long pale stretch of him, at the sparse hair on his chest with its hints of grey, at the tangle of curls between his legs and the soft penis within, still reddened, a little, Harold thinks, and still a little slick from earlier; they ought to shower before they dress for dinner - _Il Convivio di Troianai_ is one of Harold’s favourites, and he likes to do it justice.

But it’s like a current running through him, like the pit of his stomach heating, as though someone lit a fire deep inside, seeing John this way. Because honestly the nakedness _is_ knowledge. Knowledge that John will show himself to Harold like this. That John will be vulnerable before him. That this is something John, somehow, wants Harold for.

Perhaps you can take knowledge from sex, when it becomes the way the person you’re with chooses to give something to you.

“The way... _that_ made me feel,” Harold attempts to elucidate, shying from trying to find the precise verb, gesturing between them. “I've never felt anything quite so... But that wasn’t because of your body, it was because of you.”

“I think I’m hearing a compliment,” John says, one eyebrow raised, but he’s still tense.

Harold reaches out his hand, makes himself be brave enough. Touches John’s shoulder, but it’s something.

John leans in, kisses him. Harold knows, now, how it feels to be kissed by someone who’s had the world, and chose you. This, they're getting better at.

\- - -

The time after sex is still sometimes better than the sex part. Harold doesn't know if that's his age or just how he's always been.

Or whether it's John, and how John is – is always, but is especially _after_ , so calm and soothed and peaceful, satisfied.

"Here," John says, handing Harold a mug of Sencha green, coming to sit on the bed again himself, his coffee cradled in his hands. It sounds like it's still snowing outside, the wind wailing through the glass and steel canyons. John's insisted on Harold wearing John's own towelling dressing gown, which means John is only in his boxers.

Harold would protest more, but the cold really does eat into his spine, and, well, John is in his boxers, and Harold knows now that John never minds being touched, never wants Harold to stifle the urge to reach out.

At least there are some clean clothes here at the safe 'house’, the duplex apartment which Harold decided to purchase initially, he's not ashamed to admit, to give Shaw fewer reasons to turn up unexpectedly at the library. It was intended to be a working space, but gradually John’s few personal possessions seemed to migrate over, and when he managed to sleep through the night it was generally in this room. _I never lost you, here,_ John had said, once, when Harold enquired. _I never had to stare at this ceiling and wonder how to get you back._

Times like that are when kissing is useful, because what would one ever say?

Harold nursed John here. Sat at the side of a rented hospital bed and waited. Grim, endless, grief-stricken days when his heart felt like a sucking wound and Shaw had to make him eat. She'd been surprisingly able at gentleness.

That bed is gone now, and John has come home.

And Harold is with him.

Having sipped his coffee, John places it on the bedside table, sidles very carefully up behind Harold and starts kissing the back of his neck, soft brushes mapping the contours of his spine and the titanium protrusions holding it together, the ones that mean Harold can't twist to meet his mouth as some might.

"I always used to feel," Harold says, letting out the running hypothesis, the voice he permits to take over when feeling runs deep, "that there was something so very isolating about physicality. Something of an illusion of connectedness, when in some ways orgasm is the moment one is most alone, most unable to be aware of anything else." As he speaks, he puts his own tea down, reaches back and takes John's hand into his own, holding it tight.

He feels John's breath against his skin, regular and strong.

"Whereas, now..." Harold tries. He opens his mouth, but can't, words swamped as the emotions rise, and just leans back into John instead, falling carefully into the curve of John's body where he fits so well. They twist a little as they go down - slowly, John is careful, excessively careful, of Harold's joints - and finally Harold can reach John's mouth to kiss again, does that a while before migrating to John's neck, kissing and then biting, giving in to the temptation. Harold is deeply suspicious of whatever impulse in him makes expressing this roiling supernova of feelings seem best achieved by possessiveness and pain, but John seems to like it, moans and twitches under it and flutters his eyes shut.

John is hardening again, and Harold feels himself shiver in response.

“Shaw will be here in half an hour,” John says, not without some regret in his tone. “We’ve got to get ready for that museum party.”

Harold wants to draw the sheets over their heads and damn everyone else to the devil.

Oddly, it turns out that sex can give you knowledge of yourself. Harold has seen so many people kill and harm each other over this one, most basic instinct and he'd always assumed they were just... foolish. Underdeveloped super-egos, unable to keep self-control.

He knows now that sex can make someone else's body seem like your concern, your property, even part of yourself. Like losing them would kill you, so what else is there to lose?

"If you let me get up, you can dress me in the new suit..." John teases, sing-song. Harold collapses against him, laughing.

\- - -

After sex, life has to start up again, or at least, Harold has to start noticing it once more.

His guilt - for wasting a moment, for letting himself even briefly forget, for living at all and in the most visceral way - subsided considerably when he realised that denying himself this wouldn't make saving the world any more possible.

But the world he's setting out to save is different than it was before.

"Harold, please..." John is murmuring, curling himself over as he straddles Harold's lap, impaled, full, gasping, hands braced either side of Harold's head on the pillow, rhythmic spasms moving through his body as he fights the urge to move.

It's good when Harold tells John what to do, they both enjoy that beyond any expectation. John likes to fight his own body, Harold likes not to, and John likes to know in every second that Harold is comfortable, and this, this helps with all those things, and beyond that it feels...

But Harold tries not to tease much and so now he needs to move, to touch John where he's hard and straining. If only that didn't mean this moment would end. This moment looking up at John, his face and neck flushed with exertion, eyes shut, muscles whipcord tense, his abdomen fluttering, his thighs trembling. John's self, bare for Harold, every needing sinew of him.

Harold still knows so little about John's life, really. So few details from before 2010. He's never wandered through John's facebook page or seen his childhood school photos or heard him on the phone to his parents.

But he knows John Reese, all the same. And John knows him, like no one else ever has or perhaps ever could.

Harold moves his hand, starts stroking, and John bends down, burying his face in Harold's neck, moaning with every breath, ragged and guttural, shaking all over and gripping Harold now, holding onto his shoulders so tight he might leave bruises.

Harold brushes a kiss to John’s neck in turn, then bites down, hard. And John jerks, cries out, and comes all over them both, trying before he's even quite finished to start moving again, to bring Harold with him.

Harold wants that, wants that with every piece of hindbrain that ever kept him alive, and also doesn't, because he doesn't want this to end, doesn't want to have to know anything else.

You only find your paradise, perhaps, with the knowledge, with the apple. Just in time to know you can lose it, and all too easily. 

"Harold," John whispers, his voice hoarse, and kisses him, and moves, and _moves_. "It's OK. Be with me." And he's holding him, at least as best he can, and Harold feels it rising through him, the perfect warmth of not being alone at all.

He knows that, now.

\- - -

 

 

 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Life, Death and Love](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3063392) by [mizwidget](https://archiveofourown.org/users/mizwidget/pseuds/mizwidget)




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